The Herald vs. the Facts: The 2011 story errors in more detail

A CASE OF NEGLECT: THE HERALD’S KEY MISTAKES IN 2011 PRESAGE THE ERRORS IN INNOCENTS LOST

Details and citations are on the rest of this website.

In its February 27 story, The Miami Herald neglects to mention a series of key facts:

● The Herald story neglects to mention that child abuse deaths among children “known to the system” in Florida were at their lowest in the mid to late 1990s, when Florida was taking away even fewer children than now.

● The Herald story neglects to mention that such deaths shot up when Kathleen Kearney became DCF Secretary, demanded a “take the child and run” approach to child welfare and sent the number of children torn from their families soaring.

● The Herald story neglects to explain the difference between two key sets of numbers, the number of children in foster care on any given day and the number of children taken from their parents over the course of a year. The number relies exclusively on the first number, even though it can fluctuate for all sorts of reasons unrelated to how often children are taken from their parents in the first place. Obviously, you need to use the latter figure to determine if Florida is trying to take away fewer children.

● The Herald story neglects to mention that using that latter figure, entries into foster care shot up in 1999, and stayed at their obscenely high level all the way through 2005 and 2006. During all this time, child abuse deaths of children “known to the system” increased as well. Entries into foster care did not decline until 2007.

● The Herald neglects to mention that the Florida Child Abuse Death Review Committee effectively broadened significantly the definition of a maltreatment-related fatality in 2006 – which is why there is such a huge jump in the number of such fatalities that year. That broader definition remains in effect.

● The Herald story neglects to mention that an apples-to-apples comparison – that is 2006 through 2009 - shows no pattern in the rise and fall of child abuse fatalities among children “known to the system.”

● The Herald does mention that such deaths declined in 2009 from the previous year – toward the very bottom of a 2,300 word story. The Herald story neglects to mention that during that same year, the number of children taken from their parents declined by 10 percent.

UPDATE, FEB. 2012: The Herald could not know it at the time, since the figures would not be released for months, but in 2010, deaths of children "known to the system" plummeted again - even as the number of children taken from their parents remained at the lowest level since 1998. During 2009 and 2010, deaths of children known to DCF were reduced by nearly half. When the data are released, the Herald fails to report them.

● The Herald story repeatedly gets its time frames wrong. It ignores data before 1999, and it confuses events before the reforms with events afterwards. It also implies that Florida received a waiver from federal funding restrictions several years before the waiver actually was granted.

● The Herald story does not mention that it is impossible to compare accurately child abuse death figures across states – except to the extent that it quotes the one person readers are least likely to believe, a spokesman for DCF. Some states are far more aggressive about ferreting out such cases, and some states have far better systems of medical examiners or coroners and so are more likely to detect maltreatment.

● The Herald story neglects to mention that the Florida Child Abuse Death Review Committee itself says it is impossible to compare fatality numbers across years and across states.

Most important, this massive case of journalistic neglect threatens to start another foster-care panic – a huge sudden spike in removals of children from their homes. That does enormous harm to children needlessly taken from everyone they know and love even as it makes tragedies like the one now in the news even more likely.

Why we're responding to Innocents Lost, and earlier failures at the Herald.

This post was updated on February 19, 2012 and November 12, 2015

This website actually began three years before the publication of the Miami Heraldseries Innocents Lost. That’s because the same distortions and misrepresentations that characterize the Herald series were apparent in earlier reporting as well. So in addition to our in-depth response to Innocents Lost, this website includes detailed analysis of that earlier reporting. This introduction also covers both:

About 15 years ago, the state of Florida was the national example of failure in child welfare. News organizations across the state flocked to Florida after it was revealed that a foster child had been missing for 14 months – and was presumed dead – before the state Department of Children and Families even noticed.

In fact, NCCPR had predicted the collapse of the Florida system in 1999, shortly after Kathleen Kearney, a former Broward County judge, was named to run it.

Kearney’s approach to child welfare could be boiled down to a single sentence: Take the child and run. During her first year as DCF Secretary, the number of children torn from their homes soared by 50 percent, the worst statewide“foster care panic”we’ve ever seen. And entries into foster care stayed at this obscenely high level for seven years.

NCCPR issued report after report on Florida’s failure. And ultimately those reports, and other factors had an impact.

A new governor, Charlie Crist, brought in new leadership. First Bob Butterworth and then George Sheldon reversed course and embraced safe proven approaches to keeping families together.Independent outside evaluations found that the reforms improved child safety.And during 2009 and 2010, the two years when Florida took away the fewest children since 1998, deaths of children previously known to DCF plummeted by nearly half.

In 2011, we noted that if anything, there is a need for more such reform. Even in 2010, Florida’s statewide rate of removal still was abovethe national average, and significantly above the rate in states that take, proportionately, far fewer children – including Alabama which the Heralditself says should be a model for Florida. So the notion that, during the Butterworth and Sheldon years, some kind of pendulum had swung too far toward preserving families was a myth.

But ever since Butterworth and Sheldon changed course, opponents – what we have come to call the “Kearney DCF-in-exile” - waited for a horror story in an attempt to discredit the reforms. There’s no literal organization by that name, of course. There are no secret handshakes or clandestine meetings. They’re just a bunch of people who either worked for Kearney or supported her policies; people who believe the destruction of all those families somehow made children safer – notwithstanding overwhelming evidence that it did nothing of the sort.

They found an eager ally in Carol Marbin Miller, the longtime reporter on the child welfare beat for The Miami Herald. Miller is a skilled and tenacious journalist. She’s as good at poring over documents as she is at ingratiating herself with sources and colleagues. She’s mastered the art of making everyone feel she is their friend. Indeed, her ability to make people want to like her also makes it hazardous for anyone to criticize her, since she has so many friends among Florida journalists.

But somewhere along the line Miller went from reporter to advocate – becoming a de facto spokeswoman for the “Kearney DCF-in-exile.” In her stories in 2011, she did exactly what she did in Innocents Lost: She distorted data, took information out of context, got time frames wrong, and systematically left out facts that contradicted her point of view.

That kind of reporting endangers children. In 2011 we wrote that it risked setting off another foster care panic, a huge sudden spike in needless removals of children from their homes. And that, of course is what happened – twice. There was a spike in removals in 2011 and then, just when things had gotten back to normal, Innocents Lost set off a foster-care panic that continues to this day.

Not only does this do enormous harm to the children needlessly taken, it also overloads workers so they have less time to find children in real danger and are prone to take shortcuts.

Indeed, that first foster-care panic, under Kearney, may well have contributed to a key failure in the very case that made headlines in 2011, the death of Nubia Barahona, something made clear by the far superior reporting ofThe Palm Beach Post.

The fact that the child who died a hideous death, and her brother, who nearly suffered the same fate, allegedly are victims of a foster father who had adopted them didn’t matter. In a front-page story on February 27, 2011, Miller soon exploited the tragedy to attack reforms that have successfully reduced foster care and improved child safety in Florida; something she’d already tried to do late in 2009. In retrospect, it’s clear that this February 27, 2011 story was, in effect, the template for Innocents Lost

For a short time, it worked. During the first month after Miller's shoddy reporting, entries into foster care soared. But other media didn't buy the snake oil Miller was selling. Virtually every major news organization in Florida has been to this site. Their reporting set the record straight.

Sadly, as of December, 2011, entries into care were up about 13 percent compared with the same period in 2010. That's largely because of poor leadership from the DCF Secretary at the time.

Sadder still, it was just after things calmed down that Carol Marbin Miller and her colleagues engaged in the same kind of shoddy reporting, on a massive scale, and produced Innocents Lost. As we noted above, that started a foster-care panic that continues to this day.

On this website we attempt to set the record straight. This site includes:

● Our full response to Innocents Lost

●Key facts.

●An overview if the distortions and omissions in the 2011Herald story.

●The fatality data theHerald left out then and now.
●The errors line-by-line: Excerpts from the 2011 story with a detailed point-by-point rebuttal.
● The real roots of tragedy in the Barahona case.
● The trouble with “Kearney lite”.
● In search of solutions.

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The 2011 story errors in more detail